Matsu’s World: The One Less Traveled

Most of you have heard about all of the technology work and call center work from Western countries moving to India over the past decade. But wait, there’s more! Outsourcing has moved to an all new level. Now you can outsource your programming homework to a person in India. (I sure hope my son is not reading this post.)

A recent Slashdot post pointed readers to this story about students who have been outsourcing their coding homework to people in India. I suppose it was just a matter of time. After all, school papers on all sorts of topics have been available for sale on the Internet for a long time, and a lot of global corporations have been outsourcing their software development to India, why not combine the two?

This is not much different than having your roommate do your homework (for a small fee). With the time differences you can literally send your homework assignment to your “homework buddy” in India before you go to bed and while you sleep the programming homework will be written so when you wake up, you are done!

How many more ways can a person cheat? As long as people are creative, there will always be some new trick. This is just a little more high-tech and international than most.

I wonder if someone in India can write my departmental annual report for me…

This morning during an informal coffee break at work (well, it’s Friday so it was during the donut break) I mentioned the recent release of all of Charles Darwin’s works online by Cambridge University. That seemed to be news to the group of people I work with so I thought I’d post the information here for them to easily navigate to information about this new online content.

If you want to read about the project and the release of Darwin’s work, check out this Wired magazine article.

Or, you can just go straight to the Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online and begin reading digitized copies of his many writings.

This has got to be one of the stranger things on the Internet (no, please don’t share all of the things that are even stranger). It’s a music video made by prisoners — they dance to Michael Jackson’s Thriller song. Very, very strange.

As if that was not surprising enough, so far the video has been viewed almost 14 million times on YouTube. AND, more than 31,000 comments have been posted.

Exactly what kind of prison warden wakes up one morning and decides to use the inmates to produce a music video? I guess if they don’t have anything better to do…

A couple of weeks ago I wrote this post about the new telephone books arriving — with Yellow Pages — and referenced some statistics I read when surfing an article on MSN about the same topic. I had no idea I would be visited by the editor of the Yellow Pages industry website, YP Talk — his name is Ken Clark.

I don’t know if my quotes of the MSN article bothered him or it was the number of people all over the world cutting back on their use of the phone book (including Yellow Pages), but he definitely seemed upset when he left me a comment here. Then, on his website he wrote:

“Bloggers continue to tell everyone that will listen to them that THEY NEVER USE A PRINT YELLOW PAGES, and are astonished that any Cretan would ever need one.”

I get the impression that Mr. Clark doesn’t like bloggers who share their opinions or observations. That’s too bad. It’s unlikely that they will stop sharing their thoughts any time soon. I would think that fighting the bloggers would be a losing battle. But, that’s just this bloggers opinion, which isn’t worth too much.

So, back to the title of this post… just a few minutes ago Jay Leno made a funny joke on the Tonight Show (NBC). He was making fun of the Yellow Pages and said, “Yellow Pages is for the three people who don’t have the Internet.” Then, he went on to say, “And, who doesn’t like picking the phonebooks up from the driveway after a week of rain?” Apparently, it’s not just my opinion that phonebooks are used less and often abandoned at the front door.

My guess is most of those phonebooks are not picked up because they are not needed nor wanted in some homes. Eventually, they are moved from the driveway to the trash can, never entering the house. Again, that’s just my guess. Of course, I’ve done that myself and just this week I watched my neighbor do that. I took the photo in this post before they threw away the phone book. It had been sitting there for more than a week.

It seems things are pretty bleak in the phone book advertising industry. Mr. Clark also wrote…

“Guess that Armageddon has finally arrived in the Yellow Pages Industry. Time to fold the tent and move on to a new industry, new jobs, a new life. Be honest, many of you believe that don’t you? If so, you best stop right here, go find a job in another industry because we really don’t need you here.“

My guess is that people who sell advertising for Yellow Pages are seeing declines in the effectiveness of advertising in phone books and agree with Mr. Clark so they are quickly running to another industry where they might be able to make more money. It would seem that the only people making money are the printing companies that get paid for all of those phonebooks that are never read and sometimes are thrown away before they enter the house.

Mr. Clark, don’t take yourself too seriously. My previous post was meant to be amusing. And, I took the facts from a reputable source (well, mostly reputable), so I’m not sure why you have a problem with me… take this up with MSN if you disagree with their findings.

Yes, the city where I live still publishes and distributes free phone books to every household. My phonebook is actually two phonebooks. A regular size (8.5 inches by 11 inches) and smaller (half-sized) phone book. The larger one includes almost 500 white pages and over 900 yellow pages. That’s a lot of pages. And, if they wanted to save cost or natural resources by using the reduced book size, then they should not have included the full-sized phonebook with the smaller one. I’m not sure what they are thinking.

According to this MSN article, in America more than 650 million phone books were published last year (the U.S. population is only 300 million people) creating up to 1 million tons of waste. I don’t even want to think about how many of them are never used, ever. Most people under 40 never use a phone book. What do they use to look up a phone number? The Internet, of course! But that’s the point of that article.

Since phone books are costly to produce and are paid for by advertising the readership will determine how much longer they will be around. If it is not worth advertising in phone books, then the ad revenue will dry up and eventually the publishers of phone books will cut back the production and distribution.

So, what are young people using phone books for these days? Simple, phone books have become props for YouTube videos. Here are two such videos…

This first YouTube video is a type of European Mythbusters episode testing the myth that two phone books that have the pages shuffled together like a deck of cards can’t be pulled apart.

This second YouTube video demonstrates how to tear a phone book in half with just your bare hands. Yes, it can be done!

So, that is what phone books are used for by young people.

You may want to hang onto your old phone books because they may be worth something as an antique or museum piece. This website is dedicated to old phone books. If you don’t want your phone book or no longer need that old one from five years ago maybe you can send it to them instead of a landfill.